Content providers have long struggled with how to provide content at a high availability and high performance to their customers in view of bandwidth limitations in content distribution networks. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) can be a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers connected to the Internet or other public/private communication network. The goal of a CDN is to serve media content (e.g., video/audio/etc.) to User Equipment nodes (UEs) with high availability and high performance. Example UEs that can receive media content are set-top boxes, television, multimedia computers, and wireless terminals (e.g., smartphones and tablet computers).
The bandwidth requirements for distributing content from content providers to central CDN servers and/or to distributed Edge replication servers have grown tremendously with the proliferation of adaptive streaming content delivery solutions. Adaptive streaming technology is being implemented to handle increasing consumer demands for streaming content from Over The Top (OTT) applications on OTT content servers (e.g., broadcast and on demand movies/TV, etc.) across one or more CDNs to UEs having widely differing performance and protocols. Example adaptive streaming technology that continues to be developed includes Apple initiated HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol, Microsoft initiated Smooth Streaming (SS) over HTTP protocol, Adobe initiated Dynamic Streaming protocol, MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG DASH) protocol, etc. Further developments are needed to allow media to be distributed widely at the lowest cost in bandwidth and resources.